


It's Okay to be Haunted

by cantheysuffer



Category: Thor (Movies)
Genre: Age Difference, Angst with a Happy Ending, M/M, Trauma, alternate universe - artist
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-01-27
Updated: 2014-01-27
Packaged: 2018-01-10 05:18:10
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,355
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1155553
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cantheysuffer/pseuds/cantheysuffer
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Loki paints his ghosts, the nightmares he's haunted by that refuse to be constrained to a time of day. Every work of art is an exorcism, panting and hissing until the trauma bleeds out of him and onto the painting. Thor is ephemeral. Transient. A journalist, but Loki doesn't notice. He's so preoccupied with his demons he can't see what's right in front of him. Their relationship is dredged up from salvaged fragments, pieces of superficial encounters that would have been thrown away by someone else. It's all one proper conversation stretched out over five years, until Loki takes a trip and everything changes. </p><p><i>Trauma is not so much remembered as subject to unconscious and uncontrolled repetition.</i> - Jill Bennett, Empathic Vision: Affect, Trauma and Contemporary Art</p>
            </blockquote>





	It's Okay to be Haunted

**Author's Note:**

  * For [thorsicle (LadyCamillus)](https://archiveofourown.org/users/LadyCamillus/gifts).



> The original idea came from a personal post by [thorsicle](http://thorsicle.tumblr.com/), who graciously shared details of her life and encouraged me to think about creating something out of awkward real life encounters and rewriting our endings. She paints pretty skies though. The direction this took is reflective of where I am in my life right now. The nightmares are my own. 
> 
> This fic is Loki-centric.

There is always a beginning to these things, better described as an imposed demarcation in the valiant struggle against entropy. Better depending on who you ask. March twenty-fourth or April third. Those might be the days. Someone said “hello.” 

Someone else said “hi” and then “how are you?” following a tense pause. 

The first speaker looked the other over. Sizing them up. Loki was probably the first speaker here, making Thor the second. 

“Good, and you?” 

“Good.” 

And that was that. 

They both knew equally well that questions aren't questions when they are social customs. So the litany of superficial encounters began, or didn't, depending on if you think anything worth noting occurred. 

“Think it will rain?” Thor asked, two weeks later. 

“No,” Loki replied without looking up from his easel. He had long ago developed the skill to paint through interruption. Thor's words slid off him like water from a duck. 

Thor watched for a long while, until it grew dark outside and eventually it did indeed rain. He left before the studio closed at five, the hours clearly indicated on the front door, and walked home without an umbrella. He dripped on his hall carpet and readily forgot the encounter upon stepping into a hot shower. There had not been a single moment when Loki realized it had ever taken place. 

Fragments of occurrences began to collect between them; layers of detached gestures building up like dead skin cells until eventually there is dust. Physical, sticky, remnants of ephemeral instances.

“Have you met Loki?” Amora asked on the twenty-third of June. The artist glanced up from her easel upon noticing Thor pacing in Loki's empty workspace. 

“I know of him,” Thor replied. 

Hardly a story, or at least not the sort you're often told. So it went for five years. 

These casual encounters, faint and lacklustre, orbited around a single location. Built in the late nineteenth century it was a school until the sixties. It closed at some point and reopened into a mall. The old grade four classroom converted relatively easily into an art studio shared by three artists, open to the public six days a week. City sponsorship came with its benefits. Loki paid out of pocket only for his art supplies, his silver tongue covering the rest of the balance. He held his end of the conversation with the visitors that filtered through. Pausing by the chalkboard where he had lovingly pinned up his pieces. Lingering over his workspace. Observing him as he worked. Mulling over their own efforts at drawing in high school, or middle school if they had given up particularly early. 'How I wish I'd kept it up,' so it often went. 

“Made it big yet?” Thor once joked. Another of those transient conversations. November fourth, year two.

“Not yet,” Loki replied without looking at him. His nose hovered insect-like inches from the canvas, splattered with the spray of acrylic paint from over-enthusiastic brush strokes. Loki's heavy breathing matched the rhythm of his jackhammer heart. Sweat trickled down his jaw. Thor crossed his arms and leaned against the chalkboard to observe Loki playing the rodeo clown to his panic attack, riskily herding his demons into the artwork. 

“You are quite young,” Thor commented, not put off by the vague responses. Countless conversations that had begun and ended just as curtly as this one had long trained Thor out of self-conscious worries that might otherwise be prompted by Loki's apparent lack of interest. 

“Twenty-one.”

“Young enough to change your mind, should you fail,” Fandral teased as he walked over, the bite of his word choice fighting the generally pleasant tone. Thor shooed his friend away with his hand. 

“Making it big is not the mark of success,” Loki replied automatically, unconcerned with his migratory audience. Never gracing them with the attention of his gaze. 

“Oh? So that means you would not be interested in being interviewed for the local newspaper?” Thor trailed out the words, baiting him with a cocky demeanour and a smug smirk that Loki couldn't see. 

“No.”

“No what?” Thor stood up and leaned in to inspect the top corner of the canvas Loki had just finished. Loki didn't adjust to Thor's presence, moving on with the next brushstroke as if his personal space weren't being impeded upon. As if he couldn't feel Thor's breath hitch along his neck. 

“Not interested.” Loki dipped his brush into a blob of blue and scraped off some of the excess on a board propped up by the easel. Some of the paint missed the board and hit the floor, Loki's fingers shaking in tandem with his chattering teeth. “No thank you,” Loki added softly, an afterthought slow to rise from the dredges of his occupied mind. “I am sure you write very well though.”

“My full name is Thor Odinson, if you want to look my work up some time. Perhaps it would change your mind.” Thor wasn't certain Loki knew his first name, even if he had said it before. Intentions attached to words exchanged between them were short-lived. The words were rather sounds made by a tongue and a throat, rarely more. 

“Sure, I will do that,” Loki said. He didn't. 

February fourth, year three. Loki stretched a four-metre long sheet of paper on the floor, working over it with chalk on hands and knees. Thor crouched beside him. “What is it?”

“Nightmare,” Loki said, eyes trained on his fingers. “Last night.” The words came out breathy, dragged from the dregs of his mind. He thought in pictures. Lines. Shapes. Colour. Those translated poorly into words. Just like words though, every now and then the picture-thoughts refused to stop. Incessant repetitions. Exhaustive cycles, looping round and round again, until the veins in Loki's eyes strained and he could barely see what was in front of his face. He grasped at the chalk blindly, but he knew where it would go. Thor recognized the tone and stood up to give him some space. 

“My ghost,” Loki said once. “What I am haunted by,” another time. “I feel it, like it's happening again. Right now.” The words varied. The meaning remained the same. Every painting in progress offered front row seats to the self-inflicted exorcism and the artwork reflected back Loki's internal screams. 

Thor paced around the edge of the paper, scrutinizing Loki's art. There was a porch, repeated from multiple angles. Drawn over itself again and again. Depicted from several directions all at once. Loki slunk to his stomach as he finished the final painstaking details of the couple sitting on the porch. An elderly woman and man. The woman was frozen mid sip of her cup of tea. Coffee perhaps. The man stared glumly ahead, blank eyes unseeing. They would have bored straight into the viewer were they not glazed over in a milky sheen. Loki's wrist snapped back and forth, scratching into every wrinkle on the man's forehead. 

Eventually Loki fell back, legs kicked out ahead of him, to regard the piece. The chalk dropped from his fingers. The familiar spiderwebs of tension strung between his eyebrows and the bridge of his nose were gradually replaced by a slack release. 

“Done?” Thor said. 

“Yes,” Loki panted. His tongue traced a satisfied path on his lower lip in time with his sharp exhale. 

“Old age? Was that the nightmare?” Thor asked. 

Loki's eyes squinted at the paper, teeth worrying over his bottom lip. “I don't know anymore,” he admitted.

Loki shifted to his feet, picked up the paper, and draped it across the chalkboard. “It's gone,” Loki said with a shrug and left for lunch. 

Upon Loki's return he made no motions that would suggest he knew the artwork was there at all. He settled into the chair in front of his workspace and kicked his feet up on the table. Loki did not draw for the rest of the day. He hummed to himself as he scribbled on a piece of paper, producing spirals of empty scribbles. Useless repetitions of pen scratches. Again and again. He left the studio at five with a little smile. 

March eighth, year three. Loki drew a slaughter house in action. Abattoir, for the sanitation, though the success of such relies on your familiarity with French. A cow escaped on the kill floor, immortalized in a state of both alive and already dead. Thor left to throw up before the paining was complete. He dry heaved into the bushes outside the mall, choking up phlegm and spit. 

Twenty minutes later found Loki's feet kicked up on the worktable per usual. 

“What was that?” Thor's voice scraped against his numb lips.

“Was what?” Loki frowned. 

“What you drew.”

Loki stared ahead for a long while, sifting through memories. Hunting down pictures from the gutters he'd happily discarded them in. “I watched Earthlings last night.” The corners of Loki's lips quirked up in the imitation of a smile, happiness sucked dry. Bitter amusement. Apathy. 

“That was last night,” Thor accused him. 

“Yes.” 

“You have been seeing that since last night?” Thor knew the answer, but he said the words to be proven wrong. He ached to be proven wrong. His hands clenched and unclenched into fists at his sides. 

“It's always there,” Loki said softly. He stared off into the distance, face rigid. “A memory encased by skin.” Loki ran his hand self-consciously over his arm, as if to remind himself what was real. “All it takes to see it is one trigger, a single word or even a look, and when the skin rips back it's real, happening all over again,” Loki said in a trained monotone.

“What memory?”

Loki gestured to the painting and resumed drawing empty scribbles on a piece of lined paper. The gibberish of a liberated mind. 

April ninth. June twenty-first. December eleventh. Thor resigned to watching him work in silence. Loki wrenched his thoughts through his veins, past his fingertips, and into the parchment. Jaw clenched. Brow dripping in sweat. Cursing the odd while, not always in English. He spit the words out in blasphemous trances. 

After Loki had finished and collapsed into the chair Thor would find him pliable. Able to be lured into brief conversations. Short-lived interactions that left imprints in their wake. A single real encounter stretched out across hundreds of fragments. 

“I went into journalism, much to the dismay of my father,” Thor said on one of those days, best remembered as the day Loki drew a teacup. Thor couldn't make him discuss it by any means. Upon giving up Thor poured his own stories over the table between them. 

“What would your father have wanted you to do?” Loki asked.

“Family business, law. He continues to insist it is not too late to return to law school, thirty is not particularly old,” Thor paused, sky-blue eyes darting to register Loki's reaction to their age difference. Nothing appeared. “Although to my fortune my younger brother Balder has entered the practice.”

“And what of your writing?”

“Here and there.” Thor shrugged. “I enjoy it, though it helps I have no worries about paying the bills.” Not for the first time Thor lingered over the sentiment, concerns about how Loki managed a living with no apparent family money to cushion his lifestyle. Loki's name was unknown outside of the gallery and inside he did not sell any of his art. To Loki's credit he made no effort and so this couldn't really be failure. Loki forgot his pieces the moment his fingers left the canvas. They were a means to an end, the end just didn't happen to be money.

“I would really like to interview you, for the newspaper,” Thor said eventually. He repeated the desire periodically, trying out different words. Rearranging them. Sometimes he included reasons for why Loki should want to be interviewed. Other times he asked flat out.

“No thank you.” Always the same answer. So it went, more or less. 

A minor interruption was the crux of their casual encounters, sending them off in a new direction. New at last after the monotony of nothing to write home about for as long as Thor could remember. In the fifth year Loki left the country for two weeks. Thor felt his absence in lingering glances and empty spaces. Gaps between routines now torn askew. Deep tension in taken for granted familiarity. 

On the very day Loki returned Thor visited the studio, burdened with a purpose that had been collecting layer by layer until then it was unmistakeable to him. An erratic tension that made itself known. 

Loki nodded in greeting and returned to his road kill watercolour. The applied water pooled off the painting and dripped to the floor, pattering incessantly. Thor knew little about art but he suspected it wasn't supposed to do that. 

“How was the trip?” Thor asked as he stopped to stand behind Loki's right shoulder. Loki made no adjustments to Thor's presence, brush slicking with care across the canvas. His breathing was erratic. 

“Well, I enjoyed it very much.” The words didn't match the desperate way he hissed as if in physical pain. 

So ensued an aimless conversation, drifting between the play Loki had seen during his trip and the local theatre Thor recommended. A shared interest. The first conjecture between them in five years, apart from their mutual presence in the studio. With each sentence Thor stood a little straighter, regaining the confidence he typically held without effort. That day was something else entirely. Loki continued as if nothing had changed between them, like this conversation could be forgotten like all the rest. 

Thor held his breath as Loki described his favourite scene of the play. The words came slowly to Loki, an effort to concentrate on something other than the pictures that haunted his mind. 

“Would you like to go out for a drink sometime?” Thor asked quickly in a stumble of words. Loki made no motion to suggest he was aware of the change in topic. 

“Sure,” he replied.

Loki listed off his number and Thor typed it into his phone hurriedly. 

“Great, I will call you,” Thor said. 

By the time Loki looked up from his painting, mid stroke, the door of the studio swung behind Thor's retreating form. 

Loki's jaw slackened. Several seconds passed as he stared numbly at the empty doorway. 

In a delayed reaction Loki's eyebrows shot up, as frantic as if Thor was just then asking him out on a date. 

“W-what?” Loki stammered to himself. Every ephemeral gesture, every transient conversation, crashed into Loki in a wave. Meaning invested into the hitches in Thor's breath. The sound of his pulse racing beside Loki's ear. Every intimate conversation Loki had been keen to ignore bit back. The categories he had tucked Thor into, when he eventually remembered the name to go with the lingering face, were torn asunder. Acquaintance. Friend perhaps. All figments of a preoccupied mind. “Fuck,” Loki hissed under his breath. 

Two days later Loki repeated the scenario to Amora for the third time. It always ended the same way: confusion.

“No, I really did not know,” Loki said as he sunk his face into his hands. 

“Even I knew.” Amora rolled her eyes. 

“You could have told me,” Loki hissed.

Amora shrugged gracefully. “So what are you going to do?”

“Cancel,” Loki replied adamantly.

“Think about this very carefully, darling. I know you have no interest in making something of your art right now, but what about in a year when the money you already don't have dries up?” Amora gazed intently at him over the blank easel. 

“What does Thor have to do with that?”

“Thor Odinson,” Amora stressed. “Family money. Friends in high places. Connections,” she insisted with the raise of her eyebrows. “Possible opportunity for a sugar daddy.”

“Not interested.”

“Pretend you didn't realize he was asking you out. Go as a friend. Don't kiss him. Keep everything platonic,” Amora instructed. “Stop burning your bridges before they're even built.”

It began slowly. Seeping into his unconscious mind and poisoning the rest. The first painting was a coffee shop. One of the patrons sitting at the table was blonde. Long hair tucked into a bun. Muscular. Blue eyes. No, grey. Grey because Loki stabbed his brush into the water and went over them again. 

The second one was only slightly more apparent. Blonde man in a crowd. 

Then blonde man hailing a cab. 

By blonde man reading a newspaper Loki recognized the pattern. Loki tore down all the blonde man paintings and hid them under his worktable, face down. 

They were relatively harmless, until Loki received the first text. 'Hey, it's Thor. Drinks tonight?' Loki's eyes widened in horror. 

'Busy,' Loki replied. 

He stayed at the studio until four in the morning, ripping Thor on the phone out of the back of his eyelids and pouring it onto the canvas. After that one there was no point just calling them blonde man. The features had become unmistakeably clearer, unmistakeably Thor. 

Thor planting flowers. 

Thor drinking a pumpkin spice latte in a scarf. 

Thor shaving. 

It got to the point that Loki couldn't draw anything else, couldn't see anything else. 

Every time he produced a new Thor picture he would collapse into a few minutes of earned exhaustion. By the time the hour was up the haunting resumed. The space under Loki's worktable filled up. He shoved the paintings under desks scattered throughout the studio. Into garbage cans. 

As was bound to happen, the Thor pictures got out of control. One day Thor stepped on one. 

Thor picked the painting up and turned it over before Loki could stop him. “Huh,” Thor hummed. 

Loki glanced up from the sketch he kept erasing, purposely refusing to finish it while Thor lingered in the studio. Every time a recognizable feature showed up in the drawing Loki got rid of it. Loki's eyes widened as he took in Thor going over the painting. 

“This is really good,” Thor said with an approving smile. 

“No, no it is not,” Loki muttered as he walked over, grabbed the painting, and shoved it back under the worktable. Loki couldn't tell if Thor recognized that the painting was of himself. He had to. It was so obvious. But he couldn't. He absolutely couldn't. Loki's fingers shook so violently he excused himself for a lunch break. He refused to come back until the studio was closed.

Three hours later he returned to find the painting hung, on the chalkboard. “What the fuck?” Loki hissed, turning on Amora. 

She pointed to the sold sign hanging on the frame. 

“What is that?” Loki snarled.

“Sold, I knew you wouldn't recognize that sign since you've never seen it before,” she teased.

“My work does not get sold.” Loki wrenched the painting off the wall. 

The sold sign fluttered to the floor. Amora picked it up and handed it to him. “When someone offers me enough money to pay for your rent for two years, yes it does,” she insisted. 

“Who would...” Loki's voice trailed off. Attached to the sold sign was a small sticky note. 'It's okay. - Thor' Loki's face paled. 

“Yeah, I wasn't sure what that meant, he said you would,” Amora shrugged and returned to her worktable. 

Loki ran his fingers over the note as he sunk to the ground, back pressed against the wall. His breathing sped up. 

“It's okay,” Loki whispered to himself. 

“It's okay,” he repeated as he clutched at his arms and dug his fingernails into his skin. Sharp enough to remind him what was supposed to be real. His eyes bore into the note, muttering the words again and again. It was the single gesture that brought every encounter over the last five years into perspective. 

Loki pulled out his cellphone, fingers trembling over the contact list. 'Tonight - five, pick me up for drinks,' Loki texted Thor. 

Eventually Loki slid back to his workspace. Sometime later he picked up a brush. That time he didn't draw Thor, but even if he did, it would have been okay.

**Author's Note:**

> Special thanks to [Ally](i-am-thor-odinson.tumblr.com) for reading this over <3
> 
> Crossposted to [tumblr](http://cantheysuffer.tumblr.com/post/74684064889/its-okay-to-be-haunted).


End file.
